There’s Much Left to Explore

Influences

Banco de Gaia, “How Much Reality Can You Take?”

Hybrid, “Beachcoma”

Lung, “Stars, Hide Your Fires!” (in the drum thing at the end)

Aphex Twin, “Ageispolis” (the blip noise I added sounded like that song to me)

Story

This was the second completely new song for the album, and it cemented my “yes, and” approach to songmaking this go-round.  Here, it was just that repeating guitar line that I started varying with truncated polymeters:

Acoustic guitar/strings counting 4×8 = 32
Organ counting 6×5 = 30, remainder 2
“Aegispolis”-style blips counting 7×4 = 28, remainder 4
Shaker counting 5 regardless

So how it feels depends on what part you were following going in.  It took awhile to make sure everything harmonized in that space.

That led me to labyrinths, which led me to the Windows 95 pinball game Loony Labyrinth, in which you go back in time to fight minotaurs and rescue something or other while the moon is doing a thing – I’ve forgotten, as I’ve never beaten it.  What I’m familiar with is when you lose the ball and the digitized narrator says, “There’s much left to explore.”  And that’s where the song and album name came from.

I thought this song would go on longer, I got stuck thinking of how to extend it, and I went “what if I just ended it with a flourish now?”  So that is what I did. That was a new approach to me – not to flesh out every song to the last pound. If people want more of the song, they can play it back again! I want the listener to feel like there’s much…well, you see.

This turned out to be my most popular song on the album by some distance, which surprised me. It was my first successful song in the Thematic YouTube audio library, and it showed up in several other well-watched videos as a party song (in the truly 4/4 bit, not the polymeter bit – though I would love going to a polymeter party).

Some press about it

“The title track takes sampled instruments and loops them to great effect. A cycling acoustic guitar creates a hypnotic pendulum effect while pads swirl and stew and a mischievous plucky synth dances all over the track like a darting digital finch. Sequenced harmonica joins the fray recalling Underworld’s 1994 single “Dirty Epic.” – Jon Ireson, music-news.com (it’s actually a melodica there, but…darting digital finch! And the comparison to “Dirty Epic” – one of the biggest of Underworld’s influences on me – was huge. I’d mentioned Underworld in my press materials as an influence, and a lot of reviewers ran with it, but…yeah.)

“This one puts you in a cinematic universe where you feel like [you’re] quickly trying to escape a foreign country with top-secret documents while the government tries in vain to catch you. I mean, that could just be me. What I’m saying is that it paints a picture.” – Now Hear This

Next song: Desert Scorpion